Positioning the Project: Humorous Didacticism in TR's *Frog Pajamas*

Working with a substantial body of foundational political criticism, including Marx, Gramsci, and Althusser, while integrating these political ideas with contemporary research into the effect of humor on communication, comprehension, emotion and learning, this work joins in an ongoing conversation, and contributes to the discourse surrounding the intersection of these two ideas.  The theoretical conversation that links humor with political critique extends back to the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, and his analysis of Rabalais and His World [[which contributes xyz foundational premise???.]]  However, theoretical work addressing the use of humor as a didactic strategy in literature is thin, and two of the major contributions to the conversation in this paper are not journal articles or book chapters, but doctoral dissertations.  Furthermore, those dissertations have a gap of almost 30 years between them. The work done so far in this area both opens a space and points to the need for further research into the intersection of humor with political didacticism in literature.